Torrens Island Quarantine Station

We had the chance to take a free tour of the station today – I saw it offered in the middle of the night nearly a month ago on facebook and put down our names.

We needed to be at the boat ramp at Garden Island by 9.30am. We made it there with time to spare. We drove from there in a bus with our group so that we could get through the security block as you enter the island. Andrew Winkler showed us around.

If you were unlucky enough to be on a boat with a “foul Bill” (some illness found) on arrival in Adelaide you were brought here by the ship’s boat until you had made it through the quarantine period. Most of the people here were at risk of carrying smallpox, but there were others with TB and other diseases.

The quarantine station was first established in 1879.

You had to be interviewed through a little window, and then had to change into a whole new set of (disinfected) clothes after you had bathed.

There was a line up for innoculations and then off to your housing – in first, second or third class housing. Families could stay together, but single men had dormitories in one spot and women in another (behind a fence) .The dormitories are now gone, but one of the original wooden houses (able to be put up in one day without nails and prefab, straight from US) is still there along with many of the newer ones built in the 1950s. This old building was shut up and left as it was for many years before it was given some attention. I’d hate to sleep in one of these beds which have deteriorated so much over the years.

The newer houses are nothing special either

The old isolation ward is completely gone , but the morgue still stands eerily (with table in place) . There was a pretty good sized brown snake guarding this one.

And a walk to the cemetery which is isolated and apart in the neighboring conservation park. There are at least 12 graves here but no gravestones.

We walked back to check out the old chimney

and the boiler house, which was used for a while by a youth group and still has a climbing wall in place!

and the disinfecting block (where all the immigrants’ belongings were disinfected in one way or another. There is an amazing impressive autoclave in here.

The old jetty was badly affected by storms in the last few years , and you can no longer walk in the steps of these unfortunate people.

The quarantine station was last used for humans in 1979, but the area continued to be used for animals for some time after that (into the 1990s) and for egg hatching even longer than that.

I can only be grateful that we have moved onward and no longer have places like this.